* Posts by Mage

9262 publicly visible posts • joined 23 Nov 2007

Official: Office 365 Personal, Home axed next month... and replaced by Microsoft 365 cloud subscriptions

Mage Silver badge
Big Brother

Re: inferior office suite compared to the desktop offering

And if you don't need REAL time collaboration, a decent hosting package and an offline copy of LibreOffice is a more reliable, better quality and more private experience. Cheaper too for a family.

Call for netizens to demand scraped pics from Clearview, ML weather forecasts, and Star Trek goes high def with AI

Mage Silver badge
Big Brother

"Folks covered by the EU’s GDPR, the California Consumer Privacy Act, and similar laws, can ask Clearview – the controversial face-recognition startup that scraped three billion images of people from the internet – to reveal what images it may have of you in its database and delete them."

Really that's crazy. They should be fined by EU and California and forced to delete all of them. Most people impacted will never have heard of Clearview.

Planet Computers has really let things slide: Firm's third real-keyboard gizmo boasts 5G, Android 10, Linux support

Mage Silver badge
Coat

Re: Whilst I loved (and still have) my Psion5mx...

BT keyboards sleep and miss characters or randomly unpair and can take ages to setup. Sometimes they work. However proprietary 2.4 GHz wireless mini-keyboards with a USB mini-dongle work better even on an Android phone.

It's a niche product for someone that wants a nearly real pocket computer, like what a version today of the 2001/2002 Nokia 9210i would be like. Unfortunately by 2003 Nokia Phone division Management had seriously lost the plot on management and GUI choices/development.

Yeah, that Zoom app you're trusting with work chatter? It lives with 'vampires feeding on the blood of human data'

Mage Silver badge

Re: What are the alternatives?

Viber? Not sure about groups for video/audio more than 1:1, but text groups work. Unlike Skype which broke, it seems to work on Mac, Windows, Linux, iOS and Android. Japanese company.

What happens when the maintainer of a JS library downloaded 26m times a week goes to prison for killing someone with a motorbike? Core-js just found out

Mage Silver badge
Coat

Shirley!

I thought part of the idea of open source is that it's not just available, but unencumbered, thus anyone can take it over (fork if there are no write/update permissions on the "server" where it's offered)?

Or am I missing something?

Don't believe the hype: Today's AI unlikely to best actual doctors at diagnosing patients from medical scans

Mage Silver badge
Headmaster

Re: essentially standard pattern recognition

<pendant alert>

Replace "recognition" with "matching" and you are totally on the money.

No machine or computer or algorithm or AI has ever "recognised" anything in any field if we use the word "properly".

</pendant alert>

I did upvote.

Mage Silver badge
Flame

Marketing

Look at the sorts of companies making the claims (= Issuing PR) and their track record of real deployments.

Having taken up programming in the first place due to reading SF about AI, I conclude very many years later it's going to remain SF.

Amazon, Apple, Google, IBM, Microsoft speech-to-text AI systems can't understand black people as well as whites

Mage Silver badge
Boffin

Re: "Black speakers are more likely to use African American Vernacular English (AAVE)"

Most of the darker skinned people in the World are not USA Citizens.

Most actual Africans, or non-Americans of African origin do not use African American Vernacular English (AAVE).

Lots of Black people in the USA don't seem to use AAVE either. At least not the ones I met. Perhaps it's particular urban socio-economic groups in the USA that use AAVE.

Personally I think Speech recognition has hardly improved since the 1990s and over 15 years ago when it was on devices locally. I suspect a major reason for the Speech Recognition using the remote server now is the invasive capture of your behaviour. Maybe it's really much better for a certain narrow class of White Americans.

Mage Silver badge
Facepalm

Re: "it assumes race creates an accent and speech patterns"

There is negligible difference genetically between a tall fair, blue eyed Scandinavian and an African bush person. There are more genetic differences within Africa.

The tint of the skin or your height, eye or hair color or kind of hair is irrelevant to Speech Recognition. The very idea of Race was only invented to justify exploitation of various ethnic groups by more powerful groups.

Mage Silver badge
Devil

Re: "it assumes race creates an accent and speech patterns"

Like the "black" Kenyan girl bullied in a USA school by "blacks" for "speaking white".

A lot of what is called racism is plain bigotry and ignorance. Really so-called "racism" is a subset of prejudice, bigotry, xenophobia, ignorance and simply people that want to bully or control anyone not like them. So they belittle them. Race doesn't actually exist.

Mage Silver badge

Re: Racist, really?

Not just "black" people, but the entire Tech Industry tends to be White, Male and US Centric in the testing, default options, possible configurations etc.

The USA is less than 13% of the world population. A lot of their citizens speak Spanish. Why does the stupid one key less USA layout exist, resulting in badly designed non-US keyboards on laptops, BT and USB mini UK Keyboards that are really the USA one overprinted, poor non-USA support till recently on Android external keyboards, only Latin-Roman fonts on early Kindles, though that was a problem solved 10 years earlier on the underlying OS.

Absolutely everything having US Region, US Dictionary and Letter Size paper by default.

So the fact that all these USA developers ignore the rest of the world and only train their speech matching (it's NOT recognition) on a stupidly narrow subset of speakers is no surprise at all. After all it would cost much more to use proper training data.

It's 2020 and hackers are still hijacking Windows PCs by exploiting font parser security holes. No patch, either

Mage Silver badge
Devil

Re: Don't worry

Someone already arrested in the UK selling fake testing kits. Even more lucrative than masks and more believable than a "cure".

Self-driving truck boss: 'Supervised machine learning doesn’t live up to the hype. It isn’t C-3PO, it’s sophisticated pattern matching'

Mage Silver badge
Boffin

Such honesty

“Supervised machine learning doesn’t live up to the hype,” he declared. “It isn’t actual artificial intelligence akin to C-3PO, it’s a sophisticated pattern-matching tool.”

We have not advanced much, if at all, since 1980s "Expert Systems". I argued in the 1970s that if we knew how to do it we would simply have slow AI, if it was a question of needing more computing power. We have very much more CPU speed, RAM, storage and the Internet now. Still rubbish translation (hint it uses pattern matching and known "Rosetta translations", not real grammar and parsing as envisaged in the 1960s and 1970s). Hardly better spelling and grammar checkers than 35 years ago. Image Recognition that is really easily fooled pattern matching using big curated databases.

AI is more about hype and marketing than research or real products. A few big "tech" companies that didn't exist in the Mainframe era are more interested in selling overpriced gadgets or stealing usage data to help sell adverts. Not doing real AI research.

I learnt programming because I wanted to help develop AI. I think I read too much SF in the 1960s and 1970s. Modern SF with AI now seems very self-indulgent, egotistical and pointless. We are still no closer to defining what natural intelligence is, or why we have language but the smartest animals only seem to have vocabularies. Nor why it seems there is little correlation between brain size and tool using / problem solving / vocabulary in animals (compare corvids, dogs, horses, goats, dolphins, chimps, whales). There is none in humans.

Note IQ tests and Psychometric tests only compare people with the same background and training. Not at all intelligence, though we don't quite know what intelligence is. It's not purely about language, though that's important. A vocabulary IS NOT language. One is simply recall and matching and the other is still a bit mysterious.

Nation's home workers hitting refresh on 7 April can buy... Honor's bargain-basement Ryzen ultrabook

Mage Silver badge
Alien

Re: The machine bears an uncanny resemblance to the 13-inch MacBook Pro

"It's amazing how similar all these Tellurian products are," remarked the Alien visitor to the Supermarket. "Why are there so many brands with identical products?"

Seems to have the same screen as my 2 year old Lenovo E460, which now only run Linux natively.

Captain Caveman rides to the rescue, solves a prickly PowerPoint problem with a magical solution

Mage Silver badge
Linux

Re: grabbed my wellies from the boot

When did Nokia sell the wellie boot division?

Mage Silver badge
Coffee/keyboard

Re: paper mill

I wonder did Nokia sell ALL of them?

Beyond JAMstack: Next.js creator on hybrid rendering, TypeScript and Visual Studio Code

Mage Silver badge

'Just drop in this script' to run their ads.

It should be illegal in every jurisdiction. Adverts ought to be no more than a static image (served from the same host as the rest of the page) and with a plain link.

Anything else is immoral, invading privacy, misplaced greed and plain evil. Does targeted ads even work well, or is that fake snake oil perpetrated by Google and Facebook et al?

BT's Wi-Fi Disc ads banned because there's no evidence the things work

Mage Silver badge
Flame

Repeaters and Mesh

They inherently SLOW WiFi performance compared to Airpoints fed by ethernet. Basic physics and mathematics. Especially in an apartment block. I live at the edge of a village in an area with open spaces and widely spaced semis. No spare channels.

A second Airpoint (really a spare router with everything extra disabled) makes coverage perfect. Their advert is dishonest.

UK Carphone Warehouse shops set to sling their last phones, 2.9k redundancies hit high street, as Dixons closes all 531 'standalone' sites

Mage Silver badge
Flame

I thought it was mad in 2014

Dixons/Currys was bonkers buying CPW in the first place. Even the name was 10+ years past sell by date in 2014 and dedicated phone shops were already dead apart from the Mobile Operators and screen fixers selling S/H but mostly swapping screens and selling covers.

Tesco likely sells more phones than CPW.

Here CPW are trying to sell Sky Fibre Broadband, except Sky in Ireland only resells Eircom. Everyone here claims BB is fibre and lies about speed even if it's copper from the exchange. Useless Comreg. They've even been reselling Tesco!

Two years late, but upgrade wave finally washes a billion folk onto Windows 10 as its Android phone waits in the wings

Mage Silver badge

Re: What’s Brazilian Portuguese for

Or Cuy aka Cavy aka Guinea Pig? Maybe Italy and Peru.

Mage Silver badge
Black Helicopters

How many chose to buy it?

It's the most bogus figure in the history of Windows due to the way they practically forced it on existing Windows users as well as the fake end of retail end user support for XP and then recently Win7. They are still supporting Win7, just not to the public, purely out of ego to boost Win10 deployments that they make little or no money from. Public updates to Win7 would cost them almost nothing.

Windows XP ended on April 14, 2009 and paid Extended support for desktop ended on April 8, 2014, however support and distribution of patches continued for years after that if you set that your XP was a POS terminal. You could ignore all non-security upgrades.

Win 10 is more about corporate Ego and being a Cloud Services client. XP (A fixed Win 2000) and Win 7 (a fixed Vista) were the last two decent Desktop OS from MS. Better to migrate to something else now.

Also they have practically abolished QA & Test. The Windows Insider program is a failed crowd sourced testing scheme. Corporate marketing and Cloud people have too much MS Control. In reality Win7 will be getting security patches for years. Just not to the Public.

POSReady 2009 (XP SP3) Extended support ended on 9th April 2019

Windows Embedded POSReady 7 Mainstream support ended on 11th October 2016. Extended support for Windows 7 ended on 14th January 2020

Extended support forecast to end on October 12, 2021. Likely will be extended. Paid desktop Win 7 support till at least Sept 2021

Microsoft throws a bone to those unable to leave the past behind: .NET 5 support on the way for Visual Basic

Mage Silver badge

Re: BASIC

Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code

1) A cut down version of ForTran implemented by Dartmouth College. Gates and a friend ported the Dartmouth BASIC to 8080 and CP/M, stage one of launching their company. Later it was ported by them to the 6502 (I think inc. Apple & Pet?)

2) Then they bought a reverse engineered version of CP/M-86 and sold that to IBM as PC-DOS.

3) Windows on DOS was partly copied from Xerox Star (as was Lisa/Mac/Apple GS desktops) and partly out of IBM/MS OS/2 collaboration Display Manager.

4) NT starts at 3.1 (1993) presumably because partly based on the MS version of OS/2 (1989) that included LAN Manager for Win3.x computer clients.

5) Added Explorer Desktop and all 32 bit drivers etc to Win 3.11/Win32s to create win95. True OS had to be updated for free from NT 3.5 to NT 3.51 to allow Office 95 to run as had deliberately invented extra APIs to stop Office 95 on Win3.x. NT 4.0 got the Explorer Shell, only a preview to MSDN folk on NT3.51. NT4.0 got 64 bits for Alpha

6) Disastrously ME based on Win9x and released too Quickly NT5.0 (Win2000). Fixed by NT5.1 (XP). Vista was botched, too much eyeCandy, The 1st 64 bit XP was for Itanium and and short lived. 2003-2004 was the start of MS decline, with many stupid decisions. Win7 should have been free to Vista users, it's only a Vista SP. NT security crippled by badly written Win9x applications needing user to be Admin.

7) By now Office has evil Ribbon, VB6 is dead some years earlier and now they try to make desktop like a Phone with Windows 8.

8) Final stage. Local office depreciated in favour of Cloud 365, Win10 entry version least customisable since win2.0 and up to 30% less productivity than XP. Comes with spyware, adverts, excessive monochrome & flat and applications you can't remove. TWO different program menus and multiple control panels. Entry level version needs command line to create local users.

Mage Silver badge

Re: says that C# is basically a more modern C++

Um.. C++ and C# are different things. One started as preprocessor for C and intended to replace C, C++ usually produces native code.

C# developed from J++, the MS take on Java, so like Java, UCSD-Pascal and VB before .net uses a virtual machine and intermediate code.

Indeed VB.net isn't really VB at all. Basically C# made to look like VB6. An unrelated product. VB.net was PR and people needed to migrate to C# by 2006!

Mage Silver badge
Coat

We knew this in 2005?

When Vb.net and C# came out the top VB6 guru said something like:

The VB.net is a C programmers idea of VB. It's nearly impossible to convert any serious VB5 application for VB.net. Better to put the effort into C#.

By 2007 I'd concluded he was right. VB.net is not VB6. Why anyone committed to RAD on Windows used the incompatible VB.net instead of moving to C# was a mystery to me.

Also mysterious is that many VB6 programs NEVER worked on Win7 and later 64 bit, but the same programs do work on the crippled x86-64 Atom tablets and cheap latops that came only with 32bit EFI and 32 bit Win10.

For a moment I thought MS was extending REAL Visual Basic support. VB.net was never Real VB. That died with VB6.

Mine coat is the one with QT and GTK quick reference guides in the pocket. Meh, I gave up Java in 2008. C# is sort of mk2 of J++, the MS version of Java?

Welcome to Superbork: Where high-street fashion meets high-strung Windows

Mage Silver badge

Re: Point and laugh

The whippet is holding it at the door.

House of Lords push internet legend on greater openness and transparency from Google. Nope, says Vint Cerf

Mage Silver badge
Big Brother

Re: Cerf returned a polite, but firm no

He's an Alphabet PR agent. Nothing to do with his past work.

Look for the guy behind the curtain, maybe Eric Schmitt?

Think your smartwatch is good for warning of a heart attack? Turns out it's surprisingly easy to fool its AI

Mage Silver badge
Paris Hilton

Re: Lies and statistics

But how much of the Cancer detection improvement is better samples curated by experts, how much is cleverly chose results to market it? How much genuinely independent validation?

Also how are future experts trained if we totally give such things over to big corporations touting their software.

One for the super rich fanbois: Ultra-rare functional Apple-1 computer goes on auction

Mage Silver badge
Pirate

Re: assuming the builder could get real solder

Perfectly available. Very fine pitch ICs in consumer gear is permitted Tin/Lead (because the tin would grow dendrites). Certain aerospace and military parts has to use it too. The lead free stuff isn't reliable.

I've loads of chips that old. Though I'm not sure why. I think some of the exact same RAM if someone wants it.

It's likely much easier than forging good banknotes or old masters and actually such a product would be an authentic counterfeit rather than a forgery.

Mage Silver badge

battery likely to be inside

The Apple II had no battery. No separate clock or NV settings.

Original IBM PC had no battery either.

What's inside a tech freelancer's backpack? That's right, EVERYTHING

Mage Silver badge

Re: That's why you have straight power blocks.

No, mostly the 12V and 5V 2A models only allow alternate sockets too. So I have 3 way adaptors plugged in at alternate positions.

Mage Silver badge
Coat

Beep Beep Printer jam

I realised about 15 years ago that's why the printer would be empty. Sometimes I surreptitiously kept a ream of paper or two hidden in my filing cabinet.

"I must be prepared to work in variety of poorly equipped client offices across a broad spectrum of hopelessness."

Brilliant.

'Unfixable' boot ROM security flaw in millions of Intel chips could spell 'utter chaos' for DRM, file encryption, etc

Mage Silver badge
Coat

Earlier wasn't there a JTAG attack

Don't some Intel or some Mobos have a JTAG accessible via USB?

Basically if you have LOCAL access, i.e. you are the Evil Maid (or Butler), all bets are off. Encrypted Discs, TPM, etc. The wonders of HID mean that you don't personally have to be local, send a nice gamer mouse to the target.

Maybe this needs something clever connected to the computer, but unlike regular warfare the "sniper" can keep trying at that crack without getting caught.

Wouldn't surprise me either if some maker leaves a flaw via esata, or the laptop dock or HDMI signalling or USB that allows the sniping.

Mine's the one with an apparently normal set of mouse, SD card, external esata device, USB mobile modem and USB memory sticks to drop on desks or in car parks.

It's only a game: Lara Croft won't save enterprise tech – but Jet Set Willy could

Mage Silver badge

Re: isn't entirely clear to me that an FPGA could easily do the same

An FPGA simply replaces loads of ancient logic boards, or a smaller number of VLSI boards.

If you have the equivalent gate design of an AS400, or Power PC, you CAN perfectly implement the CPU in an FPGA. Or with more expensive FPGAs and older hardware, probably most or all of the PCB that the CPU lived on if it was a single chip.

What you need is the actual design and then it can be re-implemented as an FPGA.

If you debug it, then if you have 10,000 to a 1,000,000 customers (depending on sale price and complexity) you can output the files for an ASIC from a chip foundry.

It's extremely hard to replace SW by an FPGA, (unless it's pure DSP) because you have to design the HW from scratch. It's pretty simple for an FPGA guru to re-implement any HW (CPU or other) if the original design is available.

Conversely a simple slow VLSI chip can be implemented in SW on a PIC, ARM, Desktop OS etc, simply by having a spec of what it does, no need to know how it was implemented. Such as display/Keyboard interfaces on old machine tools, gadgets or radio sets. Older DMM chips or frequency counter chips can easily be done on a PIC.

Mage Silver badge

its FPGA chip

Mostly an FPGA is used when the volume is too low for an ASIC.

Almost none are in applications were the configuration is changed during use. They simulate a HW design, which obviously can have a designer designed CPU core, a real CPU core or no CPU.

Almost all are only seen during product development. The same files can produce an ASIC design, which will use a fraction of the power and may have fewer pins.

You'd only NOT use an ASIC if:

1) You are using initial customers as beta testers

2) You are not quite sure of customers requirements (see 1)

3) Volume is too low.

4) The EXTREMELY rare case where the FPGA functions will change during use and this can't be done by loading a table into Flash or RAM paired with an ASIC or inside the ASIC.

Also Spectrum, Apple II, Amiga etc have generally nothing to do with Legacy IT.

It was Spreadsheets, then databases and wordprocessing that made PCs a success in business. Hobby/Home computing was more about games and quickly diverged apart from niches like MIDI.

Perhaps the PCW series was the first and last home computer mainly NOT for games till laptops & PCs were cheap enough for home users that were neither hobbyists or gamers.

Now games on PCs bought for games rather than phones, tablets and consoles for games are a niche.

Mage Silver badge
Coffee/keyboard

The Apple II was aimed at hobbyists

Maybe initially in the USA?

Anyway it was business people due to Visicalc that made the Apple II a success. Only very rich hobbyists could afford it and knowledgeable ones assembled S100 based systems.

The Apple II had a built in Keyboard, only color in the USA and had 40 column (maybe upper case only).

I bought one for our business, falling for the hype. We spend more on accessories and upgrades than the computer.

Microsoft's Cortana turns its back on consumers as skills are stripped from Windows 10

Mage Silver badge

re: Ebay

Really selling or being listed?

Likely as you posted here, you know to check completed listings etc rather than optimistic open listings

'Developers have lost hope Microsoft will do the right thing'... Redmond urged to make WinUI cross-platform

Mage Silver badge
Coffee/keyboard

Oh, no!

'WinUI, which Microsoft is positioning as “the native UI platform for Windows 10,” should target not only Windows, but also Linux, Mac, iOS, Android and WebAssembly – this last so it would also run in a web browser.'

MS has made such a pig's ear of Win 10 GUI that they can keep it.

US Homeland Security mistakenly seizes British ad agency's website in prostitution probe gone wrong

Mage Silver badge
Black Helicopters

Re: .com top-level domain is owned by a US company

Um, doesn't the USA in some sense control the Internet and all domains?

I know the UN / ITU is a bit flawed, but the USA isn't a better alternative.

Your phone wakes up. Its assistant starts reading out your text messages. To everyone around. You panic. How? Ultrasonic waves

Mage Silver badge
Big Brother

Aliasing ADC acts as a down conversion mixer?

I presume this works due to a lack of a low pass filter between the microphone and the ADC and the fact ANY unfiltered ADC will alias signals above the sample rate, acting like a mixer. So it also relies on knowing the default sample rate for the model.

A remotely connected piece of custom HW can be fitted in a light socket, plug socket, behind a clock, smoke alarm, built into table etc. Connected to UWB spread spectrum, GSM, 3G, 4G, fibre or WiFi.

Wi-Fi of more than a billion PCs, phones, gadgets can be snooped on. But you're using HTTPS, SSH, VPNs... right?

Mage Silver badge

Re: powerline ethernet adapters

No, they are radios in the sense that DSL is, just not tested as such. Only the very fastest models will interfere with FM. It's MW & SW they interfere with. In some cases the lighting wires radiate and DSL can suffer interference (same band), but that's rare.

Surge protectors, breakers, UPS units etc rarely cause problems but poorly filtered SMPSUs will stop them working.

At least they are encrypted.

Some get RFI certification by either not connecting to data or testing only unit.

Mage Silver badge
Boffin

Re: powerline ethernet adapters

They are radios. Someone nearby can connect without the wiring. The mains provides power and helps the transmission. They'll connect over an air gap if one end is on a generator!

Famed Apple analyst chances his Arm-based Macs that Apple kit will land next year

Mage Silver badge

Re: Arm 1987

Certainly they needed to change the approach on text input. It was too hyped and too ambitious, However the Newton PDA in general, esp with Mac Sync, would have been worth sticking with.

It would have helped them in Smart phones (9 years late to market) and the iPod (a few years late to the solid state PMP market).

As it was they had to buy in the GUI and most of the iPhone design!

They were totally struggling till the record company per track deal & the iPod. The next big boost was the carrier data deals for iPhone, till then only rich & corporates could afford data access.

The eBook and eink ereader is niche, but Amazon has 90% or more of both.

I did play with a Newton at the time and thought it lacked useful applications and that the handwriting aspect was rubbish.

Mage Silver badge

Re: Arm 1987

Acorn did develop the ARM chip used in the Archimedes. Which maybe had UNIX as well as RiscOS by 1987?

Apple did invest. The fact that the ARM chips etc not spun off till later is a minor detail.

Mage Silver badge
Coat

Arm 1987

Newton. Apple did invest in ARM.

Steve came back, killed the Newton. Worst decision he made.

MS bailed out Dying Apple.

Then maybe the iPod because of iTunes saved Apple?

Also the bulk of profit is from Arm based phone (innovative carrier/data plan marketing), with Tablet and Watch a bit behind.

So they've been doing it for 13 years.

The Apple laptops are mainly so the Genius bar and HQ laptops don't have Dell logos.

Mine's the one with a Moto Dragonball PDA in the pocket.

Mage Silver badge

variety professional software that's available for Macs

I read that as Vanity Professionals.

Really on Apple Profits the sales of kit for Video Editing, DTP or gaming etc is small change. They already showed how much they cared about some users with the Waste Bin model. The Mac Air and similar might as well be an iPad with a keyboard. Coffee shop hipsters using the Web. Or aspiring writers using Scrivener.

'I give fusion power a higher chance of succeeding than quantum computing' says the R in the RSA crypto-algorithm

Mage Silver badge
Big Brother

Voting Machines

Ireland bought voting machines and eventually scrapped them. Paper and pencil isn't perfect, the STV PR isn't perfect. But voting machines, the US Electoral College, Israeli list for entire country PR and UK FPTP are all worse.

Even though we can't currently form a government. That's not to do with PR, but Civil War politics and one party being far better at Social Media and traditional media PR. Belgium didn't come to a halt because it took ages to form a government.

The USA State (Washington) having online smart phone votes is mad. A signature on a low resolution touch screen? Making a paper print out of it isn't an audit trail.

The ancient Athenian idea of voting for a pool of candidates (on paper of course) and then randomly by lot selecting the final officials (to avoid corruption) has some merit. Perhaps combine that with the PR STV larger constituencies.

Huawei unfolds latest shot at the phone-tablet hybrid with reinforced hinge and reassuringly Xs-sive price

Mage Silver badge

Re: 2,400+

Takes ages for the workers to drop the little black balls into the cells and fill with milky liquid.

I was just trying to think of a niche product with a very expensive display. Actually I don't understand why the eink panels are so expensive. I don't think it's just the low volume.

Good news, everyone: The US military says it will be ethically minded about how it develops AI

Mage Silver badge
Facepalm

Re: But!

It wasn't comprehensive and I hadn't had coffee.

Mage Silver badge
Black Helicopters

But!

Sacking a Canadian city (thinking GB was too busy with Napoleon, GB then burnt down gov buildings in Washington)

Dresden

Fire bombing Tokyo

A bombs needlessly on two Japanese cities

Arming a banana company to overthrow a South American government

Attempted invasion of Cuba

Promoting cocaine production to overthrow a South American government

Cruise missiles against Iraq

Arming Afghan Muslims against Russians

Echelon and later spying on everyone

Actual invasion of UK Colony, Granada

Illegal spying on own citizens

Extraordinary Rendition

Multiple attacks using drones in Pakistan, who they are not even at war with.

Refusal to extradite USA citizens

Refusal to allow 3rd party trials of US soldiers. Much violation of civilians at Okinawa.

They don't know what ethics are, or think they only apply to others.